1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a channel selecting system, and more particularly, to a channel selecting apparatus and process capable of performing a "POWER-ON" function of a television (TV) set and at the same time, conveniently selecting a desired channel number, without experiencing delay required for the selection of a dual channel.
2. Description of the Art
Currently, channel selecting apparatus incorporated into electric appliances such as television sets, video cassette recorder sets and the like are constructed to simultaneously activate not only the "POWER-ON" function for the set, but to also perform the channel selecting function for the electric appliance. Especially, television sets incorporating a channel selector function are constructed to select the broadcast channel desired to be received by a viewer, by using a set of numeric keys having the tens' keys corresponding to the decimal numbers zero through nine, without an additional POWER-ON key, are widely used on the European continent. As can be understood from the following description, such sets are particularly inconvenient.
For example, when a television set is in its "POWER-OFF" mode, if one of the numeric keys which include the decimal numbers "zero" to "nine" is activated by a user, the TV set is consequently placed in its "POWER-ON" mode and simultaneously selects the channel broadcast being displayed on a cathode ray tube in order to permit the user to watch television.
In the above channel selecting apparatus however, in case that the channel of the broadcast channel selected by the user to watch is a two digit number, it has a disadvantage that the user must activate not only the first key which performs the "POWER-ON" function of the television set and at the same time selects the channel designated by that first key, but also the second key which belatedly selects the desired channel indicated by the two digits represented by the first and second keys only after performing activation of a single/dual channel selecting key which selects either the single channel mode or the dual channel mode.
Many new techniques have been proposed in order to address the problem described above. A representative example of these recently proposed techniques is described in, for example, TV Channel Selector Assembly by James C. Stoddard, U.S. Pat. No. 3,943,451. According to Stoddard '451, a television channel selector assembly is provided which is effective to select a channel by merely activating a key or keys corresponding to the number of the desired channel whereby no separate channel selecting control key is necessary. With such techniques however, there is unfortunately also a disadvantage of loss of program viewing time attendant upon the delay occurring between the first key activation and the second key activation, so that the user experiences some tedium.